Paul told her, prompting a concerned sigh.
“Do you really think that’s the best thing to do? Getting all those people involved. I mean, the more people you talk to, the more people who are going to think you’re—”
She stopped herself.
“The more people who are going to think I’m what?”
“Nothing.”
“Crazy? The more people are going to think I’m crazy? Is that what you wanted to say?”
“That’s not what—I can’t take any more. I just can’t.”
She turned. Her keys were still in her hand, and she used them to unlock the front door. She went in, closed the door behind her, leaving Paul standing there in the driveway.
I’m losing her, he thought. If she doesn’t believe me, where am I?
Without Charlotte’s support, he wasn’t sure he had the strength to get through this. Whatever this was.
The front door reopened. Charlotte stood there, crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What is it?”
“It’s not funny anymore, Paul,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me?”
“Charlotte, what are you talking about?”
She pointed a finger over her shoulder. Paul ran past her and into the house, taking the steps up to the kitchen two at a time. When he reached the top, he froze.
The kitchen floor was littered with paper.
Single sheets. The same kind of paper that was loaded into his printer. At a glance, twenty, maybe thirty sheets. Scattered all over the room.
A line typed on each one.
Paul bent over, started grabbing the sheets, one by one. Reading them. He tried to keep his hands from shaking, but each page in his hands was like a leaf in a windstorm.
Blood everywhere
Laughter as we screamed
What did we do to deserve this?
We were unfaithful but that shouldn’t be a death sentence Paul lifted his gaze from the clutch of pages in his hand and looked toward the study door.
The Underwood, without a sheet of paper in it, stared back at him.
Paul felt himself being watched and turned to see Charlotte standing at the top of the stairs.
“Just tell me the truth,” she said. “Is it you?”
He looked her in the eye. “No. I swear.”
She nodded very slowly, turned to look at the typewriter, and said, “Then we have to get that fucking thing out of here.”
Thirty-Four
Paul didn’t need any time to come up with a plan.
“We take this thing, we put it in the trunk, we drive to the middle of the bridge, and drop it in the goddamn Housatonic.”
Charlotte nodded. “We could. We could do that. I like that idea.”
Paul eyed her skeptically. “I’m hearing a but.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want to do, fine, but you better do it at night. You toss something into the river and you’ll be up on some environmental charge. Littering, something. And how are you going to explain yourself if the police come by? Why does a person drop a typewriter off a bridge? What’s your story going to be? And even at night, there are probably traffic cameras.”
Paul shook his head slowly. “Is there another bridge, another place where—”
Charlotte raised a hand. “Look, for now, let’s get it out of here. We can talk about where to get rid of it permanently later.” She thought for a moment as they stood, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the Underwood. “The garage.”
Paul bit his lip. “How does that solve the problem? If there’s really something going on with this thing, moving it out of here won’t make it stop.”
“Neither would dropping it into the river, but whether it’s there, or in the garage, you’ll stop hearing it in the night,” Charlotte said. “This . . . thing can type out as many notes at it wants in the garage. If we don’t know about it, we don’t have to care.”
“Okay,” he said, a hint of defeat in his voice. “I’m in.”
He got his hands under the typewriter. It was, he realized, the first time he had ever moved it.
“This thing is heavy,” he remarked.
“I told you,” she said. “It’s a fridge with keys.”
Careful not to slip on any of the sheets of paper still on the floor, Paul walked the typewriter across the kitchen and down to the first floor. At the foot of the stairs, at right angles to the front door, was the second door—also fitted with a dead bolt lock—that led into the garage. Charlotte got ahead of Paul, turned back the bolt, opened the door, and held it for her husband. Being an interior door that led to a garage, it had a spring-loaded hinge to guard against possible carbon monoxide mishaps.
She flicked on the light switch. The garage was littered with cardboard boxes, several old bicycles, unneeded furniture.
“That,” Paul said, nodding at something in the corner.
Charlotte pointed to a wooden antique blanket box tucked up against the wall. “This?”
Paul nodded, shifting the weight of the typewriter from one arm to the other. “Yeah. Open that up. See if there’s anything in it.”
The box was about three feet wide, a foot and a half high and deep. Charlotte lifted the lid.
“There’s a bunch of old Life magazines and National Geographics and stuff in there.”
“God, why do we have those? They were my parents’. Can you shove them over, make enough space for this thing?”
Charlotte got down on her knees and started piling magazines over to one side, creating a cavity on the left.
He leaned over and set the typewriter into the bottom of the box. When he let go, he flexed his fingers to get the blood circulating in them again. “That is one heavy son of a bitch. Okay, close it.”
Charlotte closed the lid of the blanket box as Paul scanned the room.
“What?” she asked.
“Looking for something heavy to put on top.”
“Jesus, Paul, it’s not the clown from It. It’s not going to break out and attack us.”
Paul had nothing to say to that. He found three liquor store boxes with the word BOOKS scribbled on the side in black marker. He set them on top of the blanket box.
“That should do it,” he said. “Those things weigh a ton.” He clapped his hands together, as if dusting them of dirt.
Charlotte linked an arm in his. “Do you think maybe you can relax a bit now?” When he said nothing for several seconds, she said, “Paul?”
“There’s one more person I want to talk to.”
“Who?”
“Gabriella Hoffman,” he said, and saw the doubt in his wife’s eyes.
“What can that possibly accomplish?”
“Locking that typewriter in a box doesn’t mean I don’t still have questions.”
“I don’t know, Paul. Maybe this has been a mistake. Maybe you need to put all this behind you, stop dredging up everything.” She glanced at the blanket box weighed down with the boxes of books. “I never should have bought that thing.”
“What if you were meant to buy it?” Paul asked.
“What are you saying?”
“What if this is all part of some plan?”
Charlotte looked away, not wanting to listen.
“Hear me out. Whatever the reason for those messages, it’s possible that typewriter belonged to Kenneth Hoffman, that this is the machine he forced those women to write their apologies on. What are the odds you’d be drawn to that very yard sale, find that very machine, by chance? To buy something linked to someone I know, to an issue I’d already been thinking I might write about? What are the odds of that?”
Quietly, Charlotte said, “Long.”
“Exactly. Incalculably long. But it’s a lot more believable if it was somehow preordained. What if there were some sort of force leading you to it?”
“Jesus, Paul. What force? Whose plan?”
“I don’t know. Did you find out whose house it was?”
“I told you, I’ve made calls but haven’t heard back yet.”
“Maybe it doesn’t even matter. Maybe we’re not meant to know. The typewriter just is. It has no history other than what Hoffman made them write on it. It lives in that moment.”
“It’s like a Twilight Zone episode.”
Paul couldn’t help but laugh at that. “No shit. But I think I’m meant, for whatever reason, to pursue this. And that means talking to Gabriella, and ultimately, Kenneth, who can—”